It’s been several days since @tylercowen posted the blog below, but here are my thoughts on it.
marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolu… 1/n
marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolu… 1/n
On balance, it is a stinking, utterly counterproductive mess. I think some of the points made in its main body would deserve discussion that could even be very interesting and beneficial to all parties. 2/n
But everything is overshadowed by a title and a set of questions that contain an amazing, utterly poisonous degree of arrogance. And this makes the post a steaming mess. 3/n
It is actually not that different from plenty of stuff written about economics and economists since the 2007-08 financial crisis. 4/n
I mean, scores of non-economists started pretending to be economists and told us that we suck because we did not incorporate real-world phenomena A, B, and C, and therefore we failed to predict the crisis, understand the crisis, fix the crisis, etc. 5/n
Along with fair criticisms, there were loads of crap of the purest variety in those articles and posts, as in this one. But what really pisses me off about this post is that it created the umpteenth opportunity for cheap econ bashing that no one needs at this time. 6/n
I do not know what Cowen research contributions were, but it seems clear that blogging and writing books for the general public have been his main activities for some years now. 7/n
This type of work should *never* be lumped in the same basket as the work that many research economists at organizations of all types are doing, also incorporating insights from epidemiology. 8/n
And yet Cowen created the perfect opportunity for a large number of people to make snarky, casual remarks about “economists,” using the term as if we were all indistinguishable members of the same group. 9/n
It is especially sad when such snark comes from people who should know better, because they are aware of the differences, they reach large audiences, and they should know that their casual remarks end up biasing the perception of an entire profession. 10/n
When we do not incorporate tools and insights from other fields, we are (perhaps rightly) told that we are insular, we do not cite fields X and Y, we do not use long-established tools from field Z, and we are arrogant and rotten. 11/n
When we—and I mean the community of research economists, not the bloggers—do incorporate tools and insights from other fields to study the largest crisis of our times, and we try to take into account phenomena most of us indeed usually do not think about, 12/n
people are busy casually dumping crap on the entire economics profession for pretending to be something else—courtesy of Cowen’s post and perhaps some similar ones. 13/n
I watched several of the recent econ research virtual seminars on work that merges tools from epidemiology and economics. I have seen nothing but respects for epidemiology. The same respect is evident in the IMF’s World Economic Outlook work that was just released. 14/n
The overwhelming majority of economists fully supports the measures that epidemiologists have been recommending. An amazing degree of consensus for our profession. 15/n
Right now, we all stand to gain from cooperation and serious interdisciplinary work spanning economics, epidemiology, and more. For valuable cross-fertilization to happen, we must be open to acknowledging that we can all learn from each other. 16/n
We do not need arrogant posts that can be twisted into images of the entire profession and we do not need casual snark from journalists and other types of commentators. They only light--and then fan--the flames of very counterproductive fires. 17/17
